Gold and Chestnuts – Another kuri kinton

Well there are homonyms… kuri kinton and kuri kinton
When I came to Japan, I first saw the New Year Osechi Ryori kuri kinton 栗金団, and well, when I hear the name, I think of this kind. “kin” means gold, and well, for simple brains like mine, it looks like it :

Do you remember the wagashi I called kuri ?
Kuri, the sweet

Well the full name is kuri kinton 栗金飩, the Chinese character is different. It doesn’t look like gold, I call it kuri.

Today this is the Osechi Ryori (good-luck cuisine) type of kuri kinton.

Osechi ryori compilation

It’s a soft-textured dessert. The recipe used for New Year is different. As the season is over, they paste chestnuts that are preserved in syrup and colored with a dry kuchinashi (gardenia) bud (or fruit ?). Sweet potato can be added, or not.

Take fresh kuri (Japanese chestnut), boil them a while… that was about 30 minutes. Cut in half and get the flesh with a spoon.

Sweet potatoes… Idem, boiled and peeled.

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The kuchinashi (gardenia) flower… I had not. That’s expensive to use only one time. And as absurd as that seems, using saffron (the pricest spice on earth) was cheaper for me, since I have a big stash of saffron that I got from a wholesale store.